New York Times & Guardian reporting on Modern Slavery Act prosecution of Glodi Wabelua
March 08, 2025
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
The UK Modern Slavery Act and similar legislation in other countries is highly relevant to some of the rogue practices that have emerged in the open source software environment.
Rather than reading through dry legal texts, it can be useful to read a real world case study. The prosecution of Glodi Wabelua was notable because he was the first person convicted for a domestic trafficking offence where his victims simply traveled on a regular train ticket.
There were rival opinions about this. A New York Times commentary by Selam Gebrekidan expressed concern that drug dealers should be dealt with under laws for drug dealers and that a modern slavery prosecution was some kind of excess.
The government insisted on these restrictions because, in its eyes, Mr. Wabelua was not just a drug dealer.
He was a slave master.
British prosecutors have made him a test case for a novel interpretation of a 2015 law that was written to prevent the trafficking of Vietnamese women and children. Mr. Wabelua was the first drug dealer to be convicted by a jury under the law, the Modern Slavery Act — not for smuggling anyone into the country, but for dispatching a 16-year-old runner to sell drugs.
The Guardian published a commentary on the same case. The author had gone to school with Wabelua so it is an interesting read.
Cases of inner-city teenagers posted to provincial towns to deal drugs had been on the rise nationwide, and police had been looking for new ways to tackle the problem. When Wabelua was arrested in September 2014, his phone contained messages to a 16-year-old boy, as well as texts advertising drug deals in Portsmouth and Folkestone. In October 2016, six months after his conviction for drugs offences, detectives visited Wabelua in Brixton prison and charged him with an additional offence under the Asylum and Immigration Act 2004: human trafficking.
Given the novelty of the case under British law, many news reports appeared about the same subject. More articles appeared with comment about the content of news reports. Then blogs like this appeared.
Reading the equivalent legislation in French and other languages, I felt it is actually very similar to the British legislation. Equivalent prosecutions are possible in other countries and other contexts.
One of the key points is that the means of transporting the victims is not really important. Whether they are hidden in a freight compartment or sitting alongside other passengers on a regular train, the simple act of traveling raises the possibility that it is trafficking.
The next key point is that consent from the victim can't be used as a defence by somebody accused of trafficking. The teenage drug mules employed by Wabelua had consented to go on a journey and deliver drugs.
The trafficking prosecution is based on the fact that the victims are exploited. In the case of teenagers delivering drugs, the money they were paid for their day of crime does not adequately pay them for the time they would spend in jail if they were caught.
The law takes this particular case even more seriously because the age of the drug mules makes it harder for them to understand the risk and the consequences.
For exploitation to be criminal, it does not have to be a question of age. Any set of circumstances where the worker is deceived or where the worker is at risk of seriously adverse consequences could be seen as a form of exploitation.
Look at the way Molly de Blanc was sent from Boston to Germany to promote the felony crime of civil disorder. If people watching her talk had gone out and started a small mob then de Blanc could have been prosecuted. Since the re-election of Donald Trump, people promoting civil disorder in the United States have been pardoned. But if de Blanc had started a riot abroad, the US President could not pardon her.
de Blanc admits attending one of Sage Sharp's witchcraft courses. If Sharp and other people manipulated de Blanc into promoting this Gobbledygook and those people bought her a ticket to Germany to promote mob tactics then they have trafficked her.
We see the same phenomena in the operation of the rogue Swiss legal insurance scheme. █